You may agree 100 percent with the president’s position on gun control, but his stagey histrionics, his endless reliance upon human props, his cheap sloganeering, his emotionally driven hectoring: all of that bespeaks a very deep contempt for his audience, which is the American people. If he really believes that surrounding himself with adorable little tots is a substitute for substantive arguments for well-thought-out policy proposals, he thinks that the people — you people — are a bunch of rubes.

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When George W. Bush landed on that aircraft carrier and popped out in a flight suit, it was a piece of self-conscious theater — and, Bush being Bush, slyly self-deprecating. Look at the goofy look on his face in the pictures: The grin is simultaneously hokey (“I know this is a silly stunt”) and cocky (“but I can fly the airplane, I did fly the airplane, and the troops love it.”) But here’s the thing about George W. Bush: He didn’t land on an aircraft carrier every damned day. If Bush’s landing on the Lincoln was a one-act play, Obama’s presidency is a never-ending piece of performance art, and a mediocre one at that.

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The magic of theater is that is has the power to overwhelm thought: For a moment, you forget that you are watching actors reciting lines that they have memorized and making scripted movements, and you are taken into the world of the play. Obama’s politics of histrionics — the little children, the Sandra Flukes, the imperial stage dressing — also is conceived with the goal of overwhelming thought. That tells you something about the president and what he stands for. The continued success of this traveling medicine show of a presidency tells you something about the American people.